Music Reviews : A Mini-Marathon of Vocal Compositions at Hoiby Fest

A generous sampling of vocal music by Lee Hoiby made a long evening at the last program of the Hoiby Festival at Cal State Long Beach on Thursday night. The actual closing of this nine-day celebration takes place at the final performance of “Summer and Smoke” by the university’s Lyric Theatre/Opera at 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

No fewer than 12 singers--faculty, guests and graduate and undergraduate students--participated in this mini-marathon, which offered 21 songs and three large chunks of Hoiby’s 1986 opera, “The Tempest.” The singing was variable, but the high quality of the music was not.

Not to waffle: Hoiby writes wondrous, not just funny, songs--songs as touching, communicative, poignant, vocally effective and pungent as any written in this century.

For those unfamiliar with the whole range of his output, this small survey was revelatory.

It showed the composer in different modes of poetic inspiration, from the declamatory (to Whitman’s text, “I Was There”) to the sentimental (the Brahmsian “Where the Music Comes From,” to the composer’s own poem) to the heroic (Emily Dickinson’s “There Came a Wind Like a Bugle”) to the horrific (the same poet’s “How the Waters Closed”) to the abstract (Wallace Stevens’ “Evening”).

There was even Hoiby’s most familiar song, “The Serpent”--with which Leontyne Price has been titillating audiences for years--as sung most engagingly by soprano Shigemi Matsumoto.

The major discovery, however, came in the excerpts from “The Tempest,” with Shakespearean libretto by Hoiby’s associate, Mark Shulgasser. These showed the composer’s thorough mastery of literary and musical language in the service of dramatic point.

Hoiby himself, resourceful and virtuosic pianist that he is, played the orchestral part on a grand piano; one can imagine the full effect of the complete instrumental complement, especially in the great finale of the opera.

Here, assisted nicely by the acoustics in Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall, singers David Downing (Prospero), Rose Chu (Miranda), Dwight Coots (Ferdinand) and Christina Tardif (Ariel), in particular, brought the last scene to life.

Among the other artists, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Vlahos’ intense and nuanced singing of the Four Dickinson Songs (1987) and artistic director Michael Carson’s evening-long, solid and effortless pianistic support, must be noted.